I've made my first novel, Ventus, available as a free download, as well as excerpts from two of the Virga books. I am looking forward to putting up a number of short stories in the near future.

Complete novel: Ventus

To celebrate the August, 2007 publication of Queen of Candesce, I decided to re-release my first novel as an eBook. You can download it from this page. Ventus was first published by Tor Books in 2000, and and you can still buy it; to everyone who would just like to sample my work, I hope you enjoy this version.

I've released this book under a Creative Commons license, which
means you can read it and distribute it freely, but not make derivative
works or sell it.

Book Excerpts: Sun of Suns and Pirate Sun

I've made large tracts of these two Virga books available. If you want to find out what the Virga universe is all about, you can check it out here:

Major Foresight Project: Crisis in Zefra

In spring 2005, the Directorate of Land Strategic Concepts of National Defense Canada (that is to say, the army) hired me to write a dramatized future military scenario. The book-length work, Crisis in Zefra, was set in a mythical African city-state, about 20 years in the future, and concerned a group of Canadian peacekeepers who are trying to ready the city for its first democratic vote while fighting an insurgency. The project ran to 27,000 words and was published by the army as a bound paperback book.

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First Three Chapters

Here's the whole opening section of Sun of Suns for you to try out

1

Hayden
Griffin was plucking a fish when the gravity bell rang. The dull clang
penetrated even the thick wooden walls of the corporation inn; it was
designed to be heard all over town. Hayden paused, frowned, and
experimentally let go of the fish. Four tumbling feathers flashed like
candle-flames in an errant beam of sunlight shooting between the
floorboards. The fish landed three feet to his left. Hayden watched the
feathers dip in a slow arc to settle next to it.

“A
bit early for a spin-up, ain’t it?” said Hayden. Miles
grunted distractedly. The former soldier, now corporation cook, was
busily pouring sauce over a steaming turkey that he’d just
rescued from the oven’s minor inferno. “They might need me
all the same,” continued Hayden. “I better go see.”

Miles snapped out of his reverie and squinted at Hayden.

“Your Ma left you here,” he said. “You been bad again. Pick up the fish.”

Hayden
leaned back against the table, crossing his arms. He was trying to come
up with a reply that didn’t sound like whining when the bell rang
again, more urgently. “See?” he said. “They need
somebody. Nobody in town’s as good with the bikes as I am.
Anyway, how you gonna boil this fish if the gravity goes?”

“Gravity ain’t gonna go, boy,” snapped Miles. “It’s solid right now.”

“Then I better go see what else is up.”

“You just want to watch your old lady light the sun,” said Miles.

“Don’t you?”

“Today’s just a test. I’ll wait for tomorrow, then they light it for real.”

“Come on, Miles. I’ll be right back.”

The
cook sighed. “Go, then. Set the bikes going. Then come right
back.” Hayden bolted for the door and Miles shouted,
“Don’t leave that fish on the floor!”

As
Hayden walked down the hall to the front of the inn another stray beam
of sunlight spiked up around the plank floorboards. That was a bad
sign; Mom would have to wait for deep cloud cover before lighting the
town’s new sun, lest the Slipstreamers should see it. Slipstream
would never tolerate another sun so close to their own. The project was
secret—or it had been. By tomorrow the whole world would know
about it.

Hayden walked backwards past the
well-polished oak bar, waving his lanky arms casually at his side as he
said, “Bell rang. Gotta check the bikes.” One of the
customers smirked doubtfully at him; Mama Fifty glared at him from her
post behind the bar. Before she could reply he was out the front door.

A
blustery wind was blowing out here as always, even whistling up between
the street boards. Sunlight angled around the edges of the
street’s peaked roof, bars and rectangles of light sliding along
the planking and up the walls of the buildings that crammed every
available space. The streetboards gave like springs under
Hayden’s feet as he ran up the steep curve of the avenue, which
was nearly empty at this time of day.

Gavin Town
came to life at sunshut, when the workers who slept here flooded back
from all six directions, laughing and gossiping. Merchants would
unshutter their windows for the night market as the gaslights were lit
all along the way. The dance hall would throw open its doors for those
with the stamina to take a few turns on the floor. Sometimes Hayden
picked up some extra bills by lighting the street lights himself. He
was good with fire, after all.

If he went to work
on the bikes Hayden wouldn’t be able to see the sun, so he took a
detour. Slipping down a narrow alleyway between two tall houses, he
came to one of the two outer streets of the town—really little
more than a narrow covered walkway. Extensions of houses and shops
formed a ceiling, their entrances to the left as he stepped into the
way. To the right was an uneven board fence, just a crack open at the
top. An occasional shuttered window interrupted the surface of the
fence, but Hayden didn’t pause at any of them. He was making for
an open gallery a quarter of the way up the street.

At
moments like this—alone and busy—he either completely
forgot himself or drowned in grief. His father’s death still
weighed on him, though it had been a year now; was it that long since
he and his mother had moved here? Mother kept insisting that it was
best this way, that if they’d stayed home in Twenty-two Town they
would have been surrounded by reminders of Dad all the time. But was
that so bad?

His father wouldn’t be here to
see the lighting of the sun, his wife’s completion of his
project—their crowning achievement as a family. When Hayden
remembered them talking about that, it was his father’s voice he
remembered, soaring in tones of enthusiasm and hope. Mother would be
quieter, but her pride and love came through in the murmurs that came
through the bedroom wall and lulled Hayden to sleep at night. To make
your own sun! That was how nations were founded. To light a sun was to
be remembered forever.

The gallery was just a
stretch of street empty of fence, but with a railing you could look
over. Mother called it a “braveway”; Miles used the more
interesting term “pukesight.” Hayden stepped up to the rail
and clutched it with both hands, staring.

A
gigantic mountain of cloud wheeled in front of him, nearly close enough
to touch. The new sun must be behind it; the ropes of the road from
Gavin Town to the construction site stabbed the heart of the cloud and
vanished inside it. Hayden was disappointed; if the sun came on right
now he wouldn’t see it.

He laughed. Oh, yes
he would. Father had impressed it upon him again and again: when the
sun came on, there would be no missing it. “The clouds for miles
around will evaporate—poof,” he’d said with a wave of
his fingers. “The temperature will instantly shoot up—in
fact, everything within a kilometer is going to catch fire.
That’s why the sun is situated so far from any towns. That, and
security reasons, of course. And the light . . . Hayden, you have to
promise not to look at it. It’s going to be brighter than
anything you can imagine. Up close, it could burn your skin and dazzle
you through your closed eyelids. Never look directly at it, not until
we’ve moved the town.”

The cloud turned
about Hayden as he gazed at it; Gavin town was a wheel like all towns,
after all, and spun to provide its inhabitants with centrifugal
gravity. It was the only form of gravity they would ever know, and it
was a precious resource, costly and heavily taxed. Grant’s
Chance, the next nearest town, lay a dozen miles beyond the sun site,
invisible for now behind cloud.

Cloud was why the
Griffins had come here. At the edges of the zone lit by Slipstream, the
air cooled and condensation began. White mist in all its shapes made a
wall here separating the sunlit realm from the vast empty spaces of
Winter. This was the frontier. Here you could hide all manner of
things—secret projects, for instance.

The
town continued to turn and now sky opened out beyond the barrier of
mist—sky with no limits, either up, down, or to either side. Two
distant suns carved out a sphere of pale air from this endless
firmament, a volume defined by thousands upon thousands of clouds in
all shapes and sizes, most of them tinged with dusk colors of rose and
amber. There were ragged streamers indicating currents and rivers of
air; puffballs and many-armed star shapes; and many miles away, its
outlines blurred by intervening dust and mist, a mushroom head was
forming as some current of cold impacted a mass of moist air. Below and
above, walls of white blocked any further view, while whatever lay on
the other side of the suns was obscured by dazzle and golden detail.

As
it radiated through hundreds of miles of air, that light would fade and
redden, or be shadowed by the countless clouds and objects comprising
the nation of Aerie. If you traveled inward or up to civilized spaces,
the light from other distant suns would begin to brighten before you
ran out of light from yours; but if you went down or back, you would
eventually reach a point where their light was completely obscured.
There, a creeping chill took over. In the dark and cold, nothing grew.
There began the volumes of Winter that made up much of the interior of
the planet-sized balloon of air, called Virga, where Hayden lived.

Gavin
Town hovered at the very edge of civilization, where the filtered light
of distant fires could barely keep crops alive. It wasn’t lonely
out here, though; above, below, and all about hung the habitations of
Man. Three miles up to the left, a farm caught the suns’ light:
within a net a hundred feet across, the farmer had gathered pulverized
rock and soil, and was growing a crop of yellow canola. Each plant
clutched its own little ball of mud and they all tumbled about slowly,
catching and losing the light in one another’s shadow. The
highway that passed near the farm was busy, a dozen or more small cars
sailing along guided by the rope that was the highway itself. The rope
extended off into measureless distance, heading for the enemy’s
city, Rush. Below and to the right, a sphere of water the size of a
house shimmered, its surface momentarily ridged by a passing breeze.
Hayden could see a school of wetfish swirling inside the sphere like
busy diamonds.

There was way too much to take in
with a single glance, so Hayden almost didn’t spot the commotion.
Motion out of the corner of his eye alerted him; leaning over the
railing and sighting left along the curving wall of the town, he saw an
unusually dense tangle of contrails. The trails led back in the
direction of the sun and as he watched, three gleaming shapes shot out
of the cloud and arrowed in the same direction.

Strange.

Just
as he was wondering what might be happening, the gravity bell rang
again. Hayden pushed himself back from the rail and ran for the main
street. It wouldn’t do for somebody else to get the bikes running
after he’d promised Miles he’d be there.

The
stairwell to the gravity engines led off the center of the street.
Gravity was a public service and the town fathers had insisted on
making its utilities both visible and accessible to everyone.
Consequently, Hayden was very surprised when he clattered down the
steps into the cold and drafty engine room and found nobody there.

Bike
Number Two still hung from its arm above the open hatchway in the
floor. It wasn’t a bike in the old gravity-bound sense; the
fan-jet was a simple metal barrel, open at both ends, with a fan in one
end and an alcohol burner at its center. You spun up the fan with a
pair of pedals and then lit the burner, and you were away.
Hayden’s own bike lay partly disassembled in the corner.
He’d been meaning to get it running tonight.

When
started and lowered through the hatch, Bikes one and two would produce
enough thrust to spin Gavin Town back up to a respectable five
revolutions per minute. This had to be done once or twice a day so
normally the engine room would have somebody in it either working,
topping up the bike’s tanks, or doing maintenance. Certainly if
the gravity bell rang, somebody would always be here in seconds and the
bike operational in under a minute.

The wind whistled through the angled walls of the room. Hayden heard no voices, no running feet.

After
a few seconds, though, something else came echoing up through the
floor. Somewhere within a mile or two, an irregular popping had started.

It was the unmistakable sound of rifle fire.

A
cracking roar shook the engine room. Hayden dropped to his stomach to
look out the floor hatch, just in time to see a bike shoot by just
meters below. It flashed Slipstreamer gold. A second later another that
gleamed Aerie green followed it. Then the town had curved up and away
and there was nothing out there but empty sky. The firing continued,
dulled now by the bulk of the town.

Now he heard
pounding footsteps and shouting from overhead. Shots rang out from
nearby, making Hayden jump. The volleys were erratic, undisciplined,
while in the distance he heard a more even, measured response.

As he ran back up the steps something whistled past his ear and hit the wall with a spang.
Splinters flew and Hayden ducked down to his hands and knees, knowing
full well that it wouldn’t do any good when this section of the
town rotated into full view of whoever was firing. The bullets would
come straight up through the decking.

He emerged
onto the still-empty street and ran to the right, where he’d
heard people firing. A narrow alley led to the town’s other outer
street. He skidded around the corner to face the braveway—and saw
bodies.

Six men had taken up firing positions at
the rail. All were now slumped there or sprawled on the planks, their
rifles carelessly flung away. The wood of the rail and flooring was
splintered in dozens of places. And for the first time in his life,
Hayden saw blood.

Something glided into view beyond
the railing, and he blinked at it in astonishment. The red and gold
sails of a Slipstream warship spun majestically there, not two hundred
yards below. Hayden could make out the figures of men moving inside the
open hatches of the thing. Beyond it, partly eclipsed, lay another
ship, and another. Contrails laced the air between and around them.

Hayden took a step toward the braveway and stopped. He looked at the bodies and at the warships, and took another step.

Something
shot past the town and he heard a shout from the empty air outside.
Gunshots sounded from below his feet and now a wavering contrail
dissipated in the air not ten feet past the railing.

He
ran to the braveway and took one of the rifles from the nerveless
fingers of its former owner. He vaguely recognized the man as someone
who’d visited the inn on occasion.

“What
do you think you’re doing?” Hayden whirled, to find Miles
bearing down on him. The cook’s mouth was set in a grim line.
“If you poke your head out they’re gonna shoot it
off.”

“But we have to do something!”

Miles
shook his head. “It’s too late for that. Take it from
somebody who’s been there. Nothing we can do now except get
killed, or wait this out.”

“But my mother’s at the sun!”

Miles
jammed his hands in his pockets and looked away. The sun was the
Slipstreamers’ target, of course. The secret project had been
discovered. If Aerie could field its own sun, it would no longer be
dependent on Slipstream for light and heat. Right now, Slipstream could
choke out Aerie’s agriculture by shading their side of the sun;
all the gains that Hayden’s nation had made in recent
years—admittedly the result of Slipstream patronage—would
be lost. But the instant that his parents’ sun came on the
situation would change. Aerie’s neighbors to the up and down,
left and right would suddenly find a reason to switch allegiances.
Aerie could never defend its sun by itself, but by building it out
here, on the edge of darkness, they stood to open up huge volumes of
barren air to settlement. That real estate would be a tremendous
incentive to their neighbors to intercede. That, at least, had been the
plan.

But if the sun were destroyed before it could
even be proven to work . . . It didn’t matter to Hayden, not
right now. All he could think was that his mother was out there,
probably at the focus of the attack.

“I’m
the best flyer in town,” Hayden pointed out. “These guys
made good targets ’cause they weren’t moving. Right now we
need all the riflemen we can get in the air.”

Miles
shook his head. “Listen, kid,” he said,
“there’s too many Slipstreamers out there to fight. You
have to pick your battles. It ain’t cowardice to do that. If you
throw your life away now, you won’t be there to help when the
chance comes later on.”

“Yeah,” said Hayden as he backed away from the braveway.

“Drop the rifle,” said Miles.

Hayden spun and raced down the alley, back to main street. Miles shouted and came after him.

Hayden
clattered down the stairs to the engine room, but only realized as he
got there that his bike was still in pieces all over the floor.
He’d planned to roll it out the open hatch and fire it up when he
was in the air. The spin of the town meant he would leave it at over a
hundred miles an hour anyway; plenty of airflow to get the thing
running, if it had been operable.

He was sitting
astride the hoist that held Bike Number Two when Miles arrived.
“What do you think you’re doing? Get down!”

Glaring at him, Hayden made another attempt to pull the pins that held the engine to the hoist. “She needs me!”

“She needs you alive! And anyway, how are you gonna steer—”

The pin came loose, and the bike fell. Hayden barely kept his hold on it, and in doing so he dropped the rifle.

Wind
burst around him, blinding him and taking his breath away. Fighting it,
he managed to wrap his legs around the barrel-shape of the bike and
used his own body as a fin to turn it so that the engine faced into the
airstream. Then he grabbed the handlebars and hit the firing solenoid.

The
engine caught under him and suddenly Hayden had a new sense of up and
down: down was behind the bike, up ahead of it—and it was all he
could do to dangle from its side as it accelerated straight into the
nearby cloud.

His nose banged painfully against the
bike’s saddle. Icy mist roared down his body, threatening to
strip his clothes away. A second later he was in clear air again. He
squinted up over the nose of the jet, trying to get a sense of where he
was.

Glittering arcs of crystal flickered in the
light of rocket-trails: Aerie’s new sun loomed dead ahead. Jet
contrails had spun a thick web around the translucent sphere and its
flanks were already holed in several places. Its delicate central
machinery could not be replaced; those systems came from the
principalities of Candesce, thousands of miles away, and used
technologies that no one alive could replicate. Yet two Slipstream
cruisers had stopped directly over the sun and were veiling themselves
in smoke as they launched broadside after broadside into it.

Mother
would have been topping up the fuel preparatory to evacuating her team.
Nobody could enter the sun while it was running; you had to give it
just enough fuel for its prescribed burn. The engineers had planned a
two minute test for today, providing there was enough cloud to block
the light in the direction of Slipstream.

A body
tumbled past Hayden, red spheres of blood following it. He noticed
abstractly that the man wore the now-banned, green uniform of Aerie.
That was all he had time for, because any second now he was going to
hit the sun himself.

Bike Number Two had never been
designed to operate in open air. It was a heavy-duty fanjet, powerful
enough to pull the whole town into a faster spin. It had handlebars
because they were required by law, not because anybody had ever
expected to use them. And it was quickly accelerating to a point where
Hayden was going to be ripped off of it by the airstream.

He
kicked out his legs, using them to turn his whole body in the pounding
wind. That in turn ratcheted the handlebars a notch to the left; then
another. Inside the bike, vanes turned in the exhaust stream. The bike
began—slowly—to bank.

The flashing
geodesics of the sun shot past close enough to touch. He had a
momentary glimpse of faces, green uniforms and rifles, and then he
looked up past the bike again and saw the formation of Slipstream jets
even as he shot straight through them. A few belated shots followed him
but he barely heard them over the roar of the engine.

And
now dead ahead was another obstacle, a spindle-shaped battleship this
time. Behind it was another bank of clouds, then the indigo depths of
Winter that lurked beyond all civilization.

Hayden
couldn’t hold on any longer. That was all right, though, he
realized. He made sure the jet was aimed directly at the battleship,
then pulled up his legs and kicked away from it.

He
spun in clear air, weightless again but traveling too fast to breathe
the air that tore past his lips. As his vision darkened he turned and
saw Bike Number Two impact the side of the battleship, crumpling its
hull and spreading a mushroom of flame against the metal plates. He
couldn’t tell whether it had penetrated the ship’s armor.

With
the last of his strength Hayden went spread-eagled to maximize his wind
resistance. The world disappeared in silvery gray as he punched his way
into the cloud behind the battleship. A flock of surprised fish flapped
away from his plummeting fall. He waited to freeze, lose consciousness
from lack of air, or hit something.

None of that
happened, though his fingers and toes were going numb as he gradually
slowed. The problem now was that he was soon going to be stranded
inside a cloud, where nobody could see him. With the din of the battle
going on, nobody would hear him either. People had been known to die of
thirst after being stranded in empty air. If he’d been thinking,
he’d have brought a pair of flapper fins at least.

He
was just realizing that anything like that would have been torn off his
body by the airstream, when the cloud lit up like the inside of a flame.

He
put a hand up and spun away from the light but it was everywhere,
diffused through the whole cloud. In seconds a pulse of intense heat
welled up and to Hayden’s astonishment, the cloud simply
vanished, rolling away like a finished dream.

The
heat continued to mount. Hayden peered past his fingers, glimpsing a
silhouetted shape between him and a blaze of impossible light. The
Slipstream battleship was dissolving, the flames enfolding it too dim
to be seen next to the light of Aerie’s new sun.

Though
he was slowing, Hayden was still falling away from the battle. This
fact saved his life, as everything else in the vicinity of the sun was
immolated in the next few seconds. That wouldn’t matter to his
mother: she and all the other defenders were already dead, killed in
the first seconds of the sun’s new light. They must have lit the
sun rather than let Slipstream have it as a prize.

The
light reached a peak of agony and abruptly faded. Hayden had time to
realize that the spherical blur flicking out of the orange afterglow
was a shockwave, before it hit him like a wall.

As he blacked out he spun away into the blue-gray infinity of Winter, beyond all civilization or hope.

2

How miserable, how abandoned.

The
feelings lit again as Lady Venera Fanning entered the tiled gallery
separating her chambers from the offices of Slipstream’s
admiralty. The headache wasn’t so bad today but her fingers still
sought out the small scar on her jaw as she entered the echoing room. A
lofty, pillared space, the hall ran almost the entire width of the
palace townwheel; she couldn’t avoid traversing it several times
a day. Every time she did she relived the endless time after the bullet
hit, when she’d lain here on the floor expecting to die. How
miserable, how abandoned.

This was a cold place.
The moaning of the wind from outside was the only sound except for her
clicking footsteps, and that of the man behind her.

She
would never enter the hall alone again. She knew it signaled weakness
to everyone around her, but she needed to hear the servant’s
footsteps behind her here, even if she wouldn’t look him in the
eye and admit her feelings.

While that damnable
hall brought back the memories whenever she entered it, Venera
hadn’t had the place demolished and replaced as her sisters would
have. At least, she would not do that until the pain that radiated up
her temples morning, noon, and night was ended. And the doctors merely
exchanged their heavy-lidded glances whenever she demanded to know when
that would be.

Venera flung back the double doors
to the admiralty and was assailed by noise and the smells of tobacco,
sweat, and leather. Right in the doorway four pages of mixed gender
were rifling a file cabinet, their ceremonial swords thrust out and
clashing in unconscious battle. Venera stepped adroitly around them and
sidled past two red-faced officers who were bellowing at one another
over a limp sheet of paper. She dodged a book trolley, its driver
invisible behind the stacks of volumes teetering atop it, and in three
more steps she entered the admiralty’s antechamber, there to
behold the bedlam of an office gearing up for war.

The
antechamber was separated into two domains by a low wooden barrier. On
the left was a waiting area, bare except for several armchairs reserved
for elderly patrons. On the right, rows of polished wooden tables were
manned by clerks who processed incoming reports. The clerks passed
updates to a small army of pages engaged in rolling steep ladders up
and down between the desks. They would periodically stop, crane their
necks upwards, then one would clamber up a ladder to adjust the height
or relative position of one of the models that hung like a frozen flock
of fish over the clerks’ heads. Two ship’s captains and an
admiral stood among the clerks, as immobile as if stranded by the
hazard of the whizzing ladders.

Venera strolled up
to the rail and rapped on it smartly. It took a while before she was
noticed, but when she was, a page abandoned his ladder and raced over
to bow.

“May I have the key to the
lady’s lounge, please?” she asked. The page ducked his head
and ran to a nearby cabinet, returning with a large and ornate key.

Venera
smiled sweetly at him; the smile slipped as a pulse of agony shot up
from her jaw to wrap around her eyes. Turning quickly, she stalked past
the crowding couriers and down a rosewood-paneled corridor that led off
the far side of the antechamber. At its end stood an oak door carved
with bluejays and finches, heavily polished but its silver door-handle
tarnished with disuse.

The servant made to follow
her as she unlocked the door. “Do you mind?” she asked with
a glower. He flushed a deep pink, and only now did Venera really notice
him; he was quite young, and handsome. But, a servant.

She
shut the door in his face and turned with her hands on her hips.
“Well?” she said to the three men who awaited her,
“what have you learned?”

“It seems you were right,” said one. “Capper, show the mistress the photos.”

The
lounge’s floors were smothered in deep crimson carpet, its walls
of paneled oak so deeply varnished as to be almost black. There were no
windows, only gaslights in peach-colored sconces here and there. While
there were enough chairs and benches for a dozen ladies to wait in
while others used the two privies, Venera had never encountered another
here. It seemed she was the only wife in the admiralty who ever visited
her husband at work.

The place smelled of blood. A
high-backed chair had been dragged into the center of the room and in
it a young man in flying leathers was now weakly rifling through an
inner pocket of his jacket. His right leg was thickly bandaged, but
blood was seeping through and dripping on the carpet, where it
disappeared in the red pile.

“That looks like
a main line you’ve cut there,” said Venera with a
professional narrowing of the eyes. The youth grinned weakly at her.
The second man scowled as he tightened a tourniquet high on the
flyer’s thigh. The third man watched this all indifferently. He
was a mild-looking fellow with a balding head and the slightly pursed
lips of someone more used to facing down sheets of paper than other
people. When he smiled at all, Venera knew, Lyle Carrier lifted his
lips and eyebrows in a manner that suggested bewilderment more than
humor. She had decided that this was because other people’s
emotions were meaningless abstractions to him.

Carrier
was a deeply dangerous man. He was as close to a kindred spirit as
she’d been able to find in this forsaken country. He was, in
fact, the one man Venera could never completely trust. She liked that
about him.

The young man hauled a sheaf of prints
out of his jacket with a grimace. He held it up for Venera to take, his
hand trembling as though it were lead weights he was handing her and
not paper. Venera snatched up the pictures eagerly and held them to the
light one by one.

“Ah . . .” The fifth
photo was the one she’d been waiting to see. It showed a cloudy
volume of air filled with spidery wooden dock armatures. Tied up to the
docks was a row of stubby metal cylinders bristling with jets. Venera
recognized the design: they were heavy cruisers, each bearing dozens of
rocket ports and crewed by no less than three hundred men.

“They
built the docks in a sargasso, just like you said,” said the
young spy. “The bottled air let me breathe on the way through.
They’re pumping oxygen to the work site using these big hoses . .
.”

Venera nodded absently. “It was one
of your colleagues who discovered that. He saw the pumps being
installed outside the sargasso, and put two and two together.”
She riffled through rest of the pictures to see if there was a better
shot of the cruisers.

“Clearly another secret
project,” murmured Carrier with prim disapproval. “It seems
nobody learned from the lesson we gave Aerie.”

“That
was eight years ago,” said Venera as she held up a picture.
“People forget . . . What’s this?”

Capper jerked awake in his chair and with a visible effort, sat up to look. “Ah, that . . . I don’t know.”

The
image showed a misty, dim silhouette partly obscured behind the wheel
of a town. The gray spindle shape suggested a ship, but that was
impossible: the thing dwarfed the town. Venera held the print up to her
nose under one of the gaslights. Now she could see little dots
scattered around the gray shape. “What are these specks?”

“Bikes,” whispered the spy. “See the contrails?”

Now
she did, and with that the picture seemed to open out for a second,
like a window. Venera glimpsed a vast chamber of air, walled by cloud
and full of dock complexes, towns, and ships. Lurking at its edge was a
monstrous whale, a ship so big that it could swallow the pinwheels of
Rush.

But it must be a trick of the light.
“How big is this thing? Did you get a good look at it? How long
were you there?”

“He’s
not going to last if I don’t get him to the doctor,” said
the man who was tending the spy’s leg. “He needs
blood.”

Venera found the other photo and held
it up beside the first. They were almost identical, evidently taken
seconds apart. The only difference was in the length of some of the
contrails.

“It’s not enough.”
Frustration made hot waves of pain radiate up from her jaw and she
unconsciously snarled. Venera turned to find only Carrier looking at
her; his face expressed nothing, as always. The leather-suited spy was
unconscious and his attendant was looking worried.

“Get
him out of here,” she said, gesturing to the servant’s door
at the back of the lounge. “We’ll need to get a full
deposition from him later.” Capper was roused enough to lean on
the shoulder of his attendant and they staggered out of the room.
Venera perched on one of the benches and scowled at Carrier.

“This
dispute with the Pilot of Mavery is a distraction,” she said.
“It’s intended to draw the bulk of our navy away from Rush.
Then, these cruisers and that . . . thing, whatever it is, will invade
from Falcon Formation. The Formation must have made a pact of some kind
with Mavery.”

Carrier nodded. “It seems
likely. That is—it seems likely to me, my lady. The difficulty is
going to be convincing your husband and the Pilot that the threat is
real.”

“I’ll worry about my husband,” she said. “But the Pilot . . . could be a problem.”

“I will of course do whatever is in the best interest of the nation,” said Carrier. Venera almost laughed.

“It won’t come to that,” she said. “All right. Go. I need to take these to my husband.”

Carrier raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to tell him about the organization?”

“It’s
time he knew we have extra resources,” she said with a shrug.
“But I have no intention of revealing our extent just yet . . .
or that it’s my organization. Nor will I be telling him about you.”

Carrier
bowed, and retreated to the servants’ door. Venera remained
standing in the center of the room for a long time after he left.

A
thousand miles away, it would be night right now around her
father’s sun. Doubtless the Pilot of Hale would be sleeping
uneasily, as he always did under the wrought-iron canopy of his heavily
guarded bed. His royal intuition told him that the governing principle
of the world was conspiracy—his subjects were conspiring against
him, their farm animals conspired against them, and even the very atoms
of the air must have some plan or other. It was inconceivable to him
that anyone should act from motives of true loyalty or love and he ran
the country accordingly. He had raised his three daughters by this
theory. Venera had fully expected that she would be disposed of by
being married off to some inbred lout; at sixteen she had taken matters
into her own hands and extorted a better match from her father. Her
first attempt at blackmail had been wildly successful, and had netted
her the man of her choice, a young admiral of powerful Slipstream. Of
course, Slipstream was moving away from Hale, rapidly enough that by
the time she consolidated her position here she would be no threat to
the old man.

She hated it here in Rush,
Slipstream’s capital. The people were friendly, cordial, and
blandly superior. Scheming was not in fashion. The young nobles
insulted one another directly by pulling hat-feathers or making
outrageous accusations in public. They fought their duels immediately,
letting no insult fester for more than a day. Everything political was
done in bright halls or council chambers and if there were darker
entanglements in the shadows, she couldn’t find them. Even now,
with war approaching, the Pilot of Slipstream refused to beef up the
secret service in any way.

It was intolerable. So
Venera had taken it upon herself to correct the situation. These photos
were the first concrete validation of her own deliberately cultivated
paranoia.

She resolutely jammed the pictures into
her belt purse—they stuck out conspicuously but who would
look?—and left by the front door.

Her servant
waited innocently a good yard from the door. Venera was instantly
suspicious that he’d been peering through the keyhole. She shot
him a nasty look. “I don’t believe I’ve used you
before.”

“No, ma’am. I’m new.”

“You’ve had a background check, I trust?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re going to have another.” She stalked back to the admiralty with him following silently.

Bedlam
continued in the admiralty antechamber, but it all seemed a bit silly
to her now—they were in a fever of anticipation over a tiny
border dispute with Mavery, while farther out a much bigger threat
loomed. Nobody liked migratory nations, least of all Slipstream. They
should be ready for this sort of thing. They should be more
professional.

A page jostled Venera and the photos
fell out of her purse. She laid a back-handed slap across the
boy’s head and stooped to grab them—to find that her
servant had already picked them up.

He glanced at
two that he held, apparently by accident, then did a double-take.
Venera wondered whether he’d tripped the page behind her back
just so he could do this.

“Give me
those!” She snatched them back, noting as she did that it was the
mysterious photos of the great, dim gray object that he’d looked
at. She decided on the spot to have him arrested on some sort of
trumped-up charge as soon as she reached the Fanning estate.

Blazing
with anger, Venera elbowed her way through the crowd of couriers and
minor functionaries, and took a side way towards the stairs. Cold air
wafted down from the stairs leading up to the cable-cars connecting the
other towns in this quartet. Fury and cold made her jaw flare with pain
so that she wanted to turn and strike the insolent young man. With a
great effort she restrained herself, and gradually calmed down. She was
pleased at her own forbearance. I can be a good person, she reminded herself.

“Fifteen hundred feet,” murmured the servant, almost inaudibly.

Venera
whirled. He was trailing a few yards behind her, his expression
distracted and wondering. “What did you say?” she hissed.

She
stared at him for a few seconds. The man was either far more cunning
than she’d given him credit for, or he was an idiot.

Or,
she reluctantly admitted to herself, maybe he really had no idea that
she’d met with someone in the lady’s room, and didn’t
expect a lady like herself to be carrying sensitive information. In
which case the photos, to him, were just photos.

“Show me.” She fished out the two shots of the behemoth and handed them to him.

Now he looked doubtful. “I can’t be sure.”

“Just show me how you reached that conclusion!”

He
pointed to the first picture. “You see in the near space here,
there’s a bike passing. That’s a standard Grey 45, and
it’s running at optimum speed, which is a hundred twenty-five
knots. See the shape of its contrail? It only gets that feathered look
under optimum burn. It’s passing close by the docks so you can
tell . . .” he flipped to the second picture, “that here
it’s gone about six hundred feet, if that dock is the size it
looks to be. The means the second picture was taken about two seconds
after the first.

“Now look at the contrails around the big ship. Lady, I can’t see any bikes that aren’t
Grey 45s in the picture. So if we assume that the ones in the distance
are Greys too, and that they’re going at optimum speed, then
these ones skimming the surface of the big ship have traveled a little
less than half its length since the first picture. That makes it a bit
over twelve hundred feet long.”

“Mother
of Virga.” Venera stared at the picture, then at him. She noticed
now that he was missing the tips of several fingers: frostbite, in all
likelihood. And his young face was red and wind-burned, except around
the eyes.

She took back the pictures. “You’re a flyer.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then what are you doing working as a body servant in my household?”

“Flying bikes is a dead-end career,” he said with a shrug.

They
resumed walking. Venera was mulling things over. As they reached the
broad clattering galleries of the cable car station, she nodded sharply
and said, “Don’t tell anybody about these, if you value
your job. They’re sensitive.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He looked past her. “Uh-oh.”

Venera
followed his gaze, and frowned. The long cable car gallery was full of
people, all of whom were crowding in a grumbling mass under the rusty
cable stays and iron-work beams of the town that formed the
chamber’s ceiling. Six green cable cars hung swaying and empty in
the midst of the throng. “What’s the hold-up?” she
demanded of a nearby naval officer.

“Cable
snapped,” he said with a sigh. “Wind shear pulled the towns
apart and the springs couldn’t compensate.”

“Don’t drown me in details. When will it be fixed?”

“You’d have to ask the cable monkeys, and they’re all out there now.”

“I have to get to the palace!”

“I’m sure the monkeys sympathize, ma’am.”

She was about to erupt in a tirade against the man, when the servant touched her arm. “This way,” he murmured.

With a furious hmmph,
Venera followed him out of the crowd. He was heading for an innocuous
side entrance. “What’s down there?” she asked.

“Bike
berths,” he said as he opened the door to another windy gallery.
This one was nearly empty. It curved up and out of sight, its right
wall full of small offices with frosted-glass doors, its left wall
opening out in a series of floor-to-ceiling arched windows. Beyond the
windows was a braveway and then open turning air.

The
gallery floor was full of hatches. About half of them had bikes
suspended over them. The place smelled of engine oil, a masculine smell
Venera found simultaneously rank and intriguing. Men in coveralls were
rebuilding a bike nearby. Its parts were laid out in a neat line across
a tarpaulin, their clean order betraying the apparent chaos of the
opened chassis.

She was in a place of men; she liked that. “You have your own bike?” she asked the servant.

“Yes.
It’s right over there.” He took a chit to the dock master
and traded it in for a key and a worn leather jacket. They went over to
the bike and he knelt to unlock the hatch beneath the gently swaying
bike.

“Let me guess,” she said. “A Grey 45?”

He
laughed. “Those are work-haulers. This is a racer. It’s a
Canfield Arrow, Model 14. I bought it with my first paycheck from your
household.”

“There’s a passenger seat,” she said, suddenly thrilled at the prospect of riding the thing.

He squinted at her. “Have you never flown a bike, Lady?”

“No. Does that surprise you?”

“I
guess it’s always been nice covered taxis for you,” he said
with a shrug. “Makes sense.” He winched open the hatch and
she took an apprehensive step back. Venera had no fear of the open air;
it was speed that frightened her. Right now the air below the hatch was
whipping by at gale force.

“We’ll get blown off!”

He
shook his head. “The dock master’s lowering a shield ahead
of the hatch. It’ll give us several seconds of slipstream to
cruise in. Just hunker down behind me—the windscreen’s
big—and you’ll be fine. Besides, I won’t take us flat
out; too dangerous inside city limits.”

He
straddled the bike and held out his hand. Venera suppressed her grin
until she was seated behind him. There were foot straps, but she had
nothing to hold onto with her hands except him. She wrapped her arms
tightly around his waist.

He pushed the starter and
she felt the engine rumble into life beneath her. Then he said,
“All set?” and reached up to unclip the winch.

They
fell into the air and for a few seconds the curve of the town’s
undersurface formed a ceiling. There was the shield, a long tongue of
metal hanging down but pulling up quickly. “Head down!” he
shouted and she buried her face in his back. Then the engine was
roaring to drown all thought, the vibration rattling up through her
spine, and they were free in the air between the city cylinders. The
wind wasn’t tearing her from this man’s grasp, so Venera
cautiously leaned back and looked around. She gave an involuntary gasp
of delight.

Contrails like spikes and ropes stood
still in the air around them. Tethers with gay flags on them slung here
and there, and everywhere taxies, winged humans, and other bikes shot
through the air. The quartet of towns that included the admiralty was
already receding behind them; she turned to look back and saw that the
cable-car system, whose independent loop touched the axle of the vast
spinning cylinder, was indeed slack. Men floated in open air around the
break, their tools arrayed in constellations about them as they argued
over what to do. Venera turned forward again, laughing giddily at the
sensation of power that pulled her up and up towards the next quartet.

They
passed heavy steel cables and then the broad cross-shaped spokes of a
town’s pinwheel. Up close the brightly colored sails were torn
and patched. In far too little time the bike was rising under another
town, the long slot of a jet entrance visible overhead. Venera’s
flyer expertly inched them into a perfect tangent course, and it seemed
as if the town’s curving underside simply reached out and settled
around them. Her flyer shut down the engine and held up a hook,
clipping it to an overhead cable just as they began to fall again. And
there they were, hanging in a gallery almost identical to the one they
just left. A palace footman ran up and began winching them away from
the slot. They had arrived.

Venera dismounted and
staggered back a few steps. Her legs had turned to jelly. Her servant
swung off the back of the bike as though nothing had just happened. He
grinned happily at her. “It’s a good beast,” he said.

“Well.”
She cast about for something to say. “I’m glad we’re
paying you enough that you can afford it.”

“Oh, I never said I could afford it.”

She
frowned, and led the way out of the gallery. From here she knew the
stairs and corridors to take to reach Slipstream’s strategic
command office. Her husband, Admiral Fanning, was tied up in meetings
there, but he would see her, she knew. She thought about how much she
would tell him regarding her spy network. As little as possible, she
decided.

At the entrance to the office she turned
and looked frankly at the servant. “This is as far as you can go.
Wait down at the docks—you can run me back home the same way you
brought me.”

He looked disappointed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Hmm. What’s your name, anyway?”

“Griffin, ma’am. Hayden Griffin.”

“All
right. Remember what I said, Griffin. Don’t talk about the photos
to anyone.” She waggled a finger at him, but even though her head
was pounding, she couldn’t summon any anger at the moment. She
turned and gestured for the armed palace guard to open the giant teak
doors.

As she walked away she thought of the
beautiful freedom Griffin must have in those moments when he flew
alone. She’d caught a glimpse of it when she rode with him. But
entangled as she was in a life of obligation and conspiracy, it could
never be hers.

How miserable. How abandoned.

Hayden
watched her go in frustration. So close! He’d gotten to within a
few yards of his target today. And then to be thwarted at the very
entrance to the command center. He eyed the palace guard, but he knew
he couldn’t take the man and the guard was eyeing him back.
Reluctantly, Hayden turned and headed back towards the docks.

He’d
nearly blown it picking up those pictures. Obviously he’d
underestimated Lady Fanning. He wouldn’t do it again. But since
he had been assigned to her, he hadn’t been able to get anywhere
near Fanning himself. If she liked him, though . . .

It was only a matter of time, he decided. Admiral Fanning would come within arm’s reach one day soon.

And then Hayden would kill him.

3

A
flock of fish had wandered into the airspace inside Quartet One,
Cylinder Two. Disoriented by the city lights spinning around them and
caught in the cyclone of air that Rush’s rooftops swept up, they
foundered lower and lower in a quickening spiral, until with fatal
suddenness they shot between the eaves of two close-leaning,
gargoyle-coigned apartments. They banged off window and ledge, flagpole
and fire escape, to end flapping and dying in a narrow street along
which they’d scattered like a blast of buckshot.

Hayden
ignored the cheering locals who ran out to scoop up the unexpected
windfall. He paced on through the darkened alleys of Rush’s night
market, noticing nothing, but instinctively avoiding the grifters and
thieves who also drifted through the crowds of out-country rubes. He
felt slightly nauseous, and twitched at every loud laugh or thud of
crate on cement.

The market was stuffed into a
warren of small streets. Hayden loved walking through the mobs; even
after living here for two years, the very fact that the city comprised
more than one cylinder amazed him. The rusting wheels of the city
provided gravity for over thirty thousand souls. Throw in the many
outlying towns and countless estates that hung in the nearby air like
sprays of tossed seed, and the population must push a hundred thousand.
The anonymity this afforded was a heady experience for an unhappy young
man. Hayden could be with people yet aloof and he liked it this way.

He
was dead tired after another long day at the Fanning estate; but if he
went back to the boarding house now, he would just pace until his
downstairs neighbors complained. He would pull at his hair, and mutter
to himself as if he were mad. He didn’t want to do that.

It
was all stress, of course—a result of spending his days so close
to his goal. He walked through the Fanning household like a dutiful
servant for hours while his mind raced through scenarios: Fanning
walking by distracted in a hallway; Hayden slipping into the admiralty
unnoticed by the omnipresent security police . . . It was all useless.
He was paralyzed by indecision and he knew it. But he would be patient,
and his chance would come.

He paused to buy a
sticky bun at a vendor he favored, and continued on down a twisting run
sided with fading clapboard. Slipstream’s sun was on its
maintenance cycle, and darkness and chill had settled over the city.
Here and there in the alleys, homeless people kept barrel fires going
and charged a penny or two to anyone who stopped to warm their hands.
Hayden sometimes stopped to talk to these men, whose faces he knew only
as red sketches lit from below. They could be valuable sources of
information, but he never revealed anything about himself to them,
least of all his name.

He’d driven Venera
Fanning again today—unnecessarily, for she could easily have
taken a cable car. He wondered at her motives in riding with him. When
he’d returned to his room he’d discovered that a faint
scent of her perfume still hovered on his jacket. It was alluring, as
she was with her porcelain complexion—marred only by the scar on
her chin—and her hair the color of Winter skies. Attractive she
might be, but she was also without doubt the most callous human being
he’d ever met. And she traded on her beauty.

Considering
his lonely existence and his reasons for being here, it was painfully
ironic to think that she was the first woman he’d given a ride to
since arriving in Rush.

Halfway down the alley was
a cul de sac. A knife seller had set up his table across its entrance,
and had mounted targets on the blank wall at the dead end. Hayden
stopped to balance a sleek dart knife on his finger. He held it out
facing away from him, then at right angles to that.

“It’s
good in all the directions of gravity,” said the vendor, who in
this light was visible only as a black cut-out shape with a swath of
distant lamp-light revealing his beige shirt collar. The black
silhouette of an arm rose in an indistinct gesture. “Try it
out.”

Hayden balanced the knife for a second
more, then flipped it and caught it behind the guard fins. He threw it
with a single twitch of his wrist and it buried itself in the center of
a target with a satisfying thump. The vendor murmured appreciatively.

“That’s
not our best, you know,” he said as he waddled back to retrieve
the knife. His mottled hand momentarily became visible as he pulled the
knife from the wall. “Try this.” Back at the table, he
fished in a case and drew out a long arrow-shape. Hayden took it from
him and turned it over with a professional eye. Triangular
cross-section to the blade, guards that doubled as fins for throwing,
and a long tang behind that with another fin on its end. Its heft was
definitely better than the last one.

He thought of
Admiral Fanning, who had led the attack on Aerie’s secret sun and
blew Gavin Town to smithereens on the way by. Without even thinking he
spun and let fly the knife. It sank dead center in the smallest target.

“Son,
you should be in the circus,” said the vendor. Hayden heard the
admiration in his voice, but it didn’t matter. “Say, do you
want to hang around a while and throw for the crowd? Could bring in
some business.”

Hayden shook his head. He
wasn’t supposed to have skills like knife throwing. “Just
dumb luck,” he said. “I guess your knives are just so good
that even an idiot can hit the bulls-eye with one.” Ducking his
head and aware of the lameness of his excuse, he backed away and then
paced hurriedly down the alley.

“That wasn’t smart,” said a shadow at his elbow.

Hayden shrugged and kept going. “What’s it to you?”

The
other fell into step beside him. Hayden glimpsed a tall, rangy figure
in the dim light. “Somebody you owe a favor, Hayden.”

He stepped away involuntarily. “Who the—”

The
man in the shadows laughed and moved into a pale lozenge of candle
light that squeezed out between the cracks of a low window. He
presented his profile to Hayden. “Don’tcha recognize me,
Hayden? Last time I saw you, you were dropping out of Gavin Town on a
runaway bike!”

“Miles?” Hayden
just stood there, painfully aware of how meetings like this were
supposed to go: the prodigal and the old soldier, laughing and slapping
each other’s backs in surprise and delight. They would head for a
bar or something, and regale each other with stories of their exploits,
only to stagger out again singing at three the next morning. Or so it
went. But he’d never much liked Miles, and what did it matter,
really, to find out now that one other person had survived the attack
on the sun? It didn’t change anything.

“What are you doing here?” he asked after the silence between them had stretched too long.

“Looking after you, boy,” said the ex-soldier. “You’re not happy to see me?”

“It’s not that,” he said with a shrug. “It’s . . . been a long time.”

“Well, long or not, I’m here now. What do you say?”

“It’s . . . good to see you.”

Miles
laughed humorlessly. “Right. But you’ll be thanking me
before long, believe me.” He started walking. “Come on. We
need to find a place to talk.”

Here it came,
thought Hayden: the bar, the war stories, the laughing. He hesitated,
and Miles sighed heavily. “Kid, what if I told you that I’d
saved your ass today? That if it weren’t for me, you’d be
on your way out of Rush by now with a permanent deport order issued
against you?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself.” Miles started walking. After a moment Hayden ran after him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“‘It’s
so good to see you, Miles. How are you doing, Miles? How did you
survive Gavin Town?’” The ex-soldier glared at Hayden as
they crossed a busy and well-lit thoroughfare. “Jeez, you were
always a surly little runt, but let me tell you, I’m wondering
whether I should have bothered faking the docs for your background
check.”

“Background check? What
background check?” He’d had two of them already, he knew, a
cursory one when he first applied for Rush residency, and a more
thorough check after he answered the call for work at the Fanning
residence. It seemed all too plausible that somebody somewhere should
want to do more digging—and now he realized who. “Venera
Fanning. She had me investigated.”

“But
not by the legal authorities,” said Miles as he ducked into
another alley. This one was empty, and meandered in the general
direction of one of the town spokes. The spoke jabbed into the heavens
above all rooftops, a tessellation of wrought-iron girders barnacled
here and there by shanty huts built by desperate homeless people. Some
spokes had municipal elevators in them and were quite well-kept; this
one was a rusty derelict unlit from any source.

“It’s
just lucky we have a man in Fanning’s network.” Miles had
disappeared in the darkness ahead. Hayden followed his voice, idly
wondering if he’d been lured in here to be mugged. “This
time they weren’t going to just hold your papers up to a light
and check the birth registries. Friends, family, co-workers—I had
to come up with them all at the last minute.”

“But how did you know about it?”

“Ah,
finally the lad asks a sensible question. Here, watch your step.”
They had reached the gnarled fist of beam and cable that was the
spoke’s base. Someone had built a crude set of stairs by simply
jamming boards into the diamond-shaped gaps in the ironwork. Miles
plodded up this, wood bending and twanging under his feet.

His
voice drifted down from overhead. “I review intercepted
dispatches about security checks. It’s my job in the
Resistance.”

Hayden raced up the steps after him. “Resistance? It still exists?”

“Hell,
Hayden, if you hadn’t pulled a disappearing act after Gavin Town
got hit, you’d still be in it. You were born into the
Resistance—you were the first baby born of two members, did you
know that? We searched for you for days after the attack . . .”

“I
didn’t know. I fell into Winter.” He looked down,
abstractly thinking how interesting the rooftops looked from just
overhead, with their shingled peaks and streamlined eaves. From here
you could see the whole circular geometry of the town, its mazes of
close-packed buildings, streetlights glowing overhead and on two sides,
while the permanent winds of Slipstream whistled from the dark open
circles of night to left and right. A gust shook him and he realized
that he’d fall hard enough to be killed if he got blown off this
precarious vantage point, so Hayden clutched the stanchions more
tightly and groped for the next ladder-like step with his free hand. He
was starting to weigh less already; they must be a hundred meters in
the air by now. “Miles, where are we going?”

“There.”
The former cook pointed straight up. The inside of the open-work spoke
was blocked by a wood ceiling ten feet further up. The surface was
white with strange, broad black bands painted across it. With a start
Hayden realized they were intended to look like shadows; this box was
supposed to be invisible if looked at from some particular
perspective—probably from the direction of the Office of Public
Infrastructure.

Miles ascended the last distance by
ladder and raising his fist, knocked it against wood. A square of light
appeared above his head, and he clambered up. “Come on in,
Hayden.”

He cautiously raised his head above
the lip of the trapdoor, and then, for the first time in many years, he
entered a cell of the Resistance.

I'm a member of the Association of Professional Futurists with my own consultancy, and am also currently Chair of the Canadian node of the Millennium Project, a private/public foresight consultancy active in 50 nations. As well, I am an award-winning author with ten published novels translated into as many languages. I write, give talks, and conduct workshops on numerous topics related to the future, including:

I use Science Fiction to communicate the results of actual futures studies. Some of my recent research relates to how we'll govern ourselves in the future. I've worked with a few clients on this and published some results.

Here are two examples--and you can read the first for free:

The Canadian army commissioned me to write Crisis in Urlia, a fictionalized study of the future of military command-and-control. You can download a PDF of the book here:

Crisis in Urlia

For the "optimistic Science Fiction" anthology Hieroglyph, I wrote "Degrees of Freedom," set in Haida Gwaii. "Degrees of Freedom" is about an attempt to develop new governing systems by Canadian First Nations people.

I'm continuing to research this exciting area and would be happy to share my findings.

Sheer Fun

Original Hardcover Edition

A Young Adult Scifi Saga

"Lean and hugely engaging ... and highly recommended."

--Open Letters Monthly, an Arts and Literature Review

Sheer Fun: The Virga Series

(Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce are combined in Cities of the Air)

“An adventure-filled tale of sword
fights and naval battles... the real fun of this coming-of-age tale includes a
pirate treasure hunt and grand scale naval invasions set in the cold, far
reaches of space. ” —Kirkus Reviews (listed in top 10 SF novels for 2006)

"With Queen of Candesce, [Schroeder] has achieved a clockwork balance of deftly paced adventure and humour, set against an intriguing and unique vision of humanity's far future.--The Globe and Mail

"[Pirate Sun] is fun in the same league as the best SF ever has had to offer, fully as exciting and full of cool science as work from the golden age of SF, but with characterization and plot layering equal to the scrutiny of critical appraisers."--SFRevu.com

"...A rollicking good read... fun, bookish, and full of insane air battles"--io9.com

"A grand flying-pirate-ship-chases-and-escapes-and-meetings-with-monsters adventure, and it ends not with a debate or a seminar but with a gigantic zero-gee battle around Candesce, a climactic unmasking and showdown, just desserts, and other satisfying stuff."--Locus